Testimony by Dr. Sven F. Kraemer, Former Director of Arms Control, National Security Council Staff before Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

CHINA, MFN, AND THE SECURITY DIMENSION

June 6, 1996

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for giving me an opportunity to testify on the security dimension of
China’s Most Favored Nation status and the U.S.-China relationship. This marks my third
appearance as a witness before your Committee. The last time was in March of last year on the
START and ABM Treaties, which also raise very troublesome security questions for the
American people.

Within the next decade or two, China will be a great power, one of the world’s two or three
most powerful nation. This is inevitable given the number and vitality of its people, China’s
national assertiveness, its already 3rd ranking economy on the globe and its regional and strategic
military might. What is not inevitable, and what American policy can significantly influence, is
whether or not China’s great power status and assertiveness will turn to aggression and whether
China can turn from its reactionary Communist ideology and the temptations of militant
nationalism to the path of democracy and peace.

U.S. leadership will be essential for reformers and reform in China in setting high standards in
human rights, trade, and security issues. A new generation of reform-minded Chinese needs our
witness and our help against an authoritarian tide, just as the Helsinki accords and international
security standards gave critical legitimacy and support to the voices of freedom behind the Soviet
empire’s Iron Curtain.

I. TRADE ARGUMENTS AGAINST MFN

This is where U.S. debate on the Most Favored Nation status for China fits into the longterm
perspective. The debate comes at a strategic cross-roads and deserves your most serious
deliberation, in contrast with the Clinton administration’s confused policy patchwork. You can
significantly help, or harm, the cause of responsible, peaceful behavior by China towards its own
people, its neighbors, the United States and the globe at large.

In terms of trade issues, I believe the United States should not conduct business as usual by
extending MFN to China this year, but should step up the pressure in support of reform. China
has broken’ numerous agreements and its trading behavior has not met proper international trade
standards, much less standards deserving of a “most favored” characterization or the “free trade”
or “normal trade rules” title with which some would rename MFN. China has too often acted
erratically and illegally, pirating our patents, restricting markets, and engaging in corrupt
practices, ‘ even as it has built up a $35 billion trade surplus against the United States and as it
ships some 40% of its exports to our shores.

The $35 billion surplus and 40% export figure prove that China needs America’s technology,
investments and markets far more than we need China’s. While a suspension of MFN will bring
some short term losses in American dollars and jobs, imagine how much greater those will be if —
through kowtowing steps such as the unconditional extension of MFN -America acquiesces in
China’s trade abuses, cuts the ground out under the reformers and sets the United States up for far
greater long-term losses as China’s ill gotten gains begin dramatically to undercut our competitive
advantage in key economic sectors and begins to cost us far larger numbers of dollars and jobs.

The $35 billion surplus and 40% export figure also prove that we have very substantial
economic leverage vis a vis China. We should precondition MFN on implementation of proper
economic standards to replace those of piracy, corruption tariffs and closed markets. We, not
China, have the real grievance and the stronger hand. Why kow-tow with further concessions?
Why not stick to tough standards and build credibility and performance for the future?

II. THE SECURITY DIMENSIONS — TEN REALITY CHECKS

An equal playing field for free trade can only be assured by political freedoms and backed by
sound security policies. Therefore, MFN and trade must always be considered in the context of
profound moral and strategic questions involving human rights and security, not just trade.
Yesterday’s Tiananmen anniversary should remind us that even more than trade, issues of human
rights and security are likely to determine China’s adoption or rejection of the paths of democracy
and peace and the ultimate success or failure of America’s relationship with China.

Thousands of voices of freedom of China’s new generation were brutalized in Tianamnen by the
“People’s Liberation Army” of the “People’s Republic of China.” What misnomers. What
“liberation” if there is no real political freedom? What “republic” if there is no real liberation?
What peace if Tibet, Taiwan and Hong Kong can be threatened and if proliferation can be
conducted as state policy. What secure trade and what secure peace if there is no democracy ‘and
if agreements cannot be trusted or enforced?

You are hearing from others here today about China’s continued abuses in the fields of trade
and human rights. For my part, I will focus on security issues neglected by officials and media
who prefer the post-Cold War illusion that strategic threats have disappeared, that democracies
and dictators are not really all that different, that America is unassailable and invincible, and that
we and our allies need to do little or nothing to provide for the common defense other than have
reasonably acceptable trade relations. President Clinton recently said that China’s greatest
security threat to America was its pollution potential from cars.

The Clinton administration expected that its stepped up “engagement” policy would inevitably
make China an increasingly democratic and peaceful strategic partner of the United States. But
that is not what has happened, and matters went wrong early. After his first trip to China, in
March 1994, Secretary of State Christopher worried that “China is going in the wrong direction.”
A proper policy shift would then have encouraged reform and reformers by vigorous and
consistent U.S. leadership in pressing for high standards in China’s behavior and in the U.S.China
relationship. Regrettably, however, the Clinton policy became even more than before one of
ambiguous signals, lost opportunities, and appeasement. Responsibilities have been neglected and
opportunities lost, the cause or reform has been set-back and new dangers are on the horizon for
the American people and her democratic allies in the Pacific.

It is time for reality checks. It’s time for bottom-up reviews and in-depth hearings. It’s time to
take the blinders off about dangerous strategic realities about China compounded by Clinton
administration policy gambles.

1. Communist China is Not Democratic and China’s Military Are Not Under Democratic
Control.

The overall strategic reality about China is that neither China’s political and military leaders nor
their programs are under democratic control and that China’s imperial drive to be a regional and
world power in economic and military terms continues, unchecked by democratic limits and too
often appeased by foreign powers including the United States.

The basic economic and political reality is that notwithstanding economic progress especially in
Beijing and the coastal cities of Shanghai and Guangzhou, a struggle continues between China’s
reformers and the old cadre and clans who resist reform and who seek to maintain a communist
society and national cohesion during the transition from Deng’s “preeminent leadership.”

In reality, the People’s Republic of China is not a “republic” at all, any more than the People’s
Democratic Republics of Eastern Europe under Soviet rule. Taiwan and Hong Kong are far more
democratic and far more like real republics. The “people” the PRC leadership still most stands for
are those of the families or “clans” of the senior Communist Party officials and the senior officer
cadre of the People’s Liberation Army. They dominate political, economic and military life and
for reasons of ideology, power and privilege they are determined to avoid Mikhail Gorbachev’s
perestroika and glasnost reforms, which overthrew Gorbachev and the Communist dictatorship
and ended the Soviet Union

In this context, official Chinese claims that China is spending only $ 5 billion a year on defense
are patently untrue. A U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) study published in 1994 provides
DoD estimates of over $30 billion and U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency estimates of
about $50 billion annually. Expenditures have risen since then and are supplemented by
high-technology acquisitions through high priority trade and intelligence operations.

There is no way of knowing the correct defense figures or program details since there is no free
Congress with the power of the purse and of appointment, nor any free press or free political
questioning. Regrettably, the Clinton administration has accepted China’s behavior and has even
augmented China’s emerging strategic threat.

2. China’s Military Modernization — Conventional and Strategic Strike Forces

China is building up modern strike forces designed for regional and internal military roles and
that it’s strategic missiles, which can reach the United States, are being substantially augmented in
their mobility and their offensive capability.

A potential Chinese strategic threat is officially denied in the Clinton administration’s public
intelligence estimates about future missile threats and is generally ignored by officials and media
focused militarily on China’s gun-boat diplomacy in the South China Seas and on its military
exercises and missile threats in and around Taiwan. China’s announced military doctrine and
programs call for highly mobile strike forces, with new generations of ships (including submarines,
destroyers and possibly a carrier) and advanced naval and land-based fighter aircraft. These
systems, some being acquired from abroad, are to be equipped with modem weapons systems and
high-tech command and communications linkages. The strike forces appear to have both regional
and internal security functions in asserting Beijing’s far-reaching sovereignty claims.

China’s vigorous nuclear force Modernization program includes a wide range of new strategic
and intermediate-range missiles based on land and sea, and appears to be benefitting from new
flows of arms and technology from Russia. These systems include new, truck-mobile nuclear
missiles whose solid-fuel propulsion and enhanced accuracy adds to their high capability and low
vulnerability. Numerous intermediate-range missiles, with strategic potential when launched with
lower-weight warheads, are hidden in caves and tunnels and include the DF-4s. Two new ICBM
systems are underway to augment the Dong Feng 5/5A (SDD-4) — the DF-31 and the DF-41.
The Julang I (CSS- N-3) missile fired from China’s XIA-class nuclear submarines will be
augmented by the intercontinental-range DF-31/JL-2.

The launches of advanced Chinese missiles in the vicinity of Taiwan in the summer of 1995 and
in March 1996 and the sales of Chinese cruise missiles to Iran which began in the 1980’s (and
killed Americans on the USS Stark) and were reported upgraded in April 1996, reflect modem
cruise missile capabilities with which China is showing its muscle. These capabilities, are
reportedly greatly enhanced by the acquisition of Western technology including advanced
computers and engines.

3. China-Russia Strategic Collaboration, SS-18s, & Other New Threats

Collaboration and
transfer of advanced weapons and technologies, possibly including SS-18 strategic ICBMS, are
increasing between Chinese and Russian military leaders including hardliners who may wish to
work against what some perceive as common, democratic enemy, the United States.

Chinese and Russian military leaders have recently described relations as the best in decades,
i.e., since the Stalin-Mao alliance. In September 1993 the two countries agreed not to target or
use force against each other, the former an agreement China rejected for the United States when
the proposed by the Clinton administration. Following several high-level exchange visits, Yeltsin’s
April 1996 visit to Beijing feted a close strategic partnership, with Yeltsin asserting that Russia
had not found a single point of disagreement with China. No disagreement on proliferation,
nuclear testing, technology theft, human rights abuses, border disputes?

Russia shows no apparent hesitation in providing advanced weapons and technologies,
including nuclear technologies, to China’s military. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Russian
military specialists are in China and a February 1996 Congressional staff study reported recent
Chinese purchases from Russia as including: 26 SU-27 fighters (with an additional 26 under
negotiation, and by now reportedly under contract), 24 Mi-17 helicopters, 10 IL-76 heavy
transport planes, 100 S-300 surface-to-air missiles and 4 mobile launchers, advanced rocket
engines and missile guidance technology, 100 Klimov/Sarkisov RD33 engines, uranium
enrichment technology and nuclear reactors.

An extremely troublesome recent development has been the possible collaboration of senior
Russian and Chinese authorities in seeking to transfer to China Russian SS-18 intercontinental
ballistic missiles, the most deadly strategic weapon of the Cold War from a deployment site in
Ukraine. All SS-18s are to be destroyed under the START 11 treaty, but in one of several
damaging amendments to the treaty, the Clinton Administration in September 1995 permitted
Russia and Ukraine to sell the stages of such systems abroad as “space launchers.” Of course
anything that can launch a “peaceful” object into space can also launch a warhead.

In January 1996 Ukraine expelled three Chinese nationals for trying to obtain SS-18s at a
missile-production facility in Dnipropctrovsk, Ukraine presumably with the cooperation of the
Russian military personnel at the site who oversee nuclear weapons security and the planned
movement of the weapons to Russia. In May 1996, these efforts were boldly renewed.

4. China’s Nuclear Weapons Tests

China has recently conducted a series of nuclear weapons tests while the United States has not,
and the Clinton administration is augmenting China’s nuclear strike capabilities.

The United States and Russia have conducted no nuclear tests since 1992, a fact soon likely to
impair the effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear deterrent in a world of evident nuclear ambitions
among a number of rogue states. During this period, China has continued a robust nuclear
weapons test program even while asserting support for a future Comprehensive Test Ban (CTB),
a top Clinton administration priority for 1996. China exploded a one megaton weapon in 1992
and conducted other large-scale nuclear tests in October 1993, in June 1994 (an H-bomb), in
October 1994, and in i995, with indications for further tests in 1996.

China points to France as an excuse, but while France conducted six small-scale underground
nuclear tests as precursors to preparing to join the Comprehensive Test Ban agreement (CTB),
France contrasts with China in the fact that all French military forces are under assured
democratic civilian control, that France has a record of compliance with treaties, and that French
military forces, including its nuclear forces, are being sharply reduced.

As in other aspects of China’s strategic modernization, Clinton administration policy on China’s
nuclear testing has been one of continuing acquiescence, and even assistance. Early in the Clinton
administration, for example, according to an October 1994 report in The New York Times: “After
China’s test last October 19931, President Clinton instructed Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary to
begin reviewing options to resume American testing at the Nevada test range but when this threat
drew no response from the Chinese, the White House conceded that nothing it could do in the
form of pressure could dissuade Beijing, and the effort was abandoned.”

In October 1994, incredibly, Secretary of Defense Perry publicly offered advanced U.S.
computer technologies to China for the express purpose of simulating nuclear weapons tests and
thus directly increasing potential threats against America’s cities if hardliners prevail in China. The
computers are reportedly of higher quality than the advanced computers deployed on the U.S.
AEGIS cruisers.

5. China’s Biological and Chemical Weapons Programs

China has a very poor record on chemical and biological warfare agreements and related
proliferation activities.

U.S. government reports have repeatedly noted China’s violations in these areas. The last
annual compliance report to the Congress issued by the President and the Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency, in 1994, noted that: “China’s CBM mandated declarations have not
resolved U.S. concerns about this program and there are strong indications that China probably
maintains its offensive programs.” The classified version of this ACDA report reportedly was even
more explicit in condemning these treaty violations.

An April 1996 proliferation report issued by the office of Secretary of Defense William Perry,
described China’s programs as follows: “China has a mature chemical warfare capability and may
well have maintained the biological war-fare program it had prior to acceding to the Biological
Weapons Convention in 1984. It has funded a chemical warfare program since the 1950’s and has
produced and weaponized a wide variety of agents. Its biological war-fare program included
manufacturing infectious micro-organisms and toxins. China has a wide range of delivery means
available, including ballistic and cruise missiles and aircraft, and is continuing to develop systems
with upgraded capabilities.”

6. China, Proliferation and Broken Treaties

China, along with Russia, has the world’s worst record on the proliferation of components and
technologies of weapons of mass destruction to rogue states.

We need to consider that those who supply and support rogues must be considered rogues
themselves. And, as General Brent Scowcroft, U.S. National Security Advisor in the Ford and
Bush administrations, has warned: “The Chinese military seems to be willing to sell weapons to
anyone who can pay the price……” including militant states hostile to the United States.”

China has accumulated an abysmal record of broken anti- proliferation treaties and broken U.S.
laws. The treaties include the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), the
Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) and the Chemical Weapons Convention. U.S. laws
broken by Chinese proliferation activities include the U.S. Nuclear Prevention Act, the U.S. Arms
Export Control Act and the National Defense Authorization Act.

China’s role in North Korea’s nuclear and missile proliferation activities is highly suspect since
North Korea’s nuclear reactors and missiles closely resemble China’s. Denying either knowledge
or leverage in North Korea China has opposed tough sanctions against North Korea and has
recently refused to participate in multilateral talks on future peaceful developments on the Korean
Peninsula.

China has supplied nuclear reactors to Algeria and Iran, chemical weapons materials to Syria
and Iran, and missiles to numerous countries including Iran, North Korea, Pakistan and Saudi
Arabia. China’s most recent illegal proliferation activities reported early in 1996 include sales to:
1) Pakistan (M-11 missiles and 5,000 ring magnets used in gas centrifuges that enrich uranium for
weapons) and 2) Iran (ballistic missile components, C-802 missiles, chemical weapons precursors,
and nuclear weapons related materials).

A particularly egregious Chinese proliferation activity came to light in March 1996 when, as
reported by The Washington Post: “U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that companies in
China are providing Iran with several virtually complete factories suited for making deadly poison
gases, an act that may violate a U.S. law as well as China’s pledge to abide by a global treaty
banning such assistance, according to U.S. officials…. For more than a year, Washington has been
monitoring a steady flow of Chinese chemical-related equipment to Iran, where it is being installed
in new factories ostensibly meant to produce industrial chemicals for commercial us. But U.S.
officials say the factories have a covert military use and have already complained to Beijing about
the assistance without avail. The influx of Chinese technology is helping to fuel what one U.S.
official described as ‘the most active chemical weapons program’ in the Third World.” It appears
that Iran may serve as a threatening Middle-Eastern surrogate for China.

The Clinton administration has with only rare and brief exceptions opposed application of the
commercial and other sanctions established under U.S. laws and international treaties. For
example, the Clinton administration has opposed the demand of Senator Larry Pressler and others
to implement the U.S. sanctions required by the 1993 U.S. Defense Authorization Act
(cosponsored by then Senator Albert Gore) against nations that transfer advanced weapons to
Iran or Iraq. Senator Pressler had noted that China’s cruise missile deal with Iran violates U.S. law
and “is a vital national security matter and demands immediate attention.” The Clinton
administration role has been one of appeasement. Far from utilizing the legal and sanctions
instruments at hand, the administration has during the past year reportedly failed to act on five
such cases placed before the President by the Congress and urging action.

7. China’s Espionage and the Abuse of China’s Defense “Conversion” and U.S. Aid

China’s technological and military espionage activities have been stepped up significantly and
are reportedly abetted by the U.S. -China Joint Defense Conversion Commission, established in
1994 by U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry and General Ding Henggao, director of the
Commission for Science Technology and Industry for National Defense (COSTIND).

The Clinton administration is ignoring numerous warnings that China is stealing or buying
advanced dual use technologies which will undermine our military security and our commercial
competitiveness in the future. According to Senator Larry Pressler: “The Chinese are engaged in
an unprecedented espionage campaign and nuclear weapons buildup …. but I can’t get senior
Clinton Administration officials to acknowledge the threat.” Representative Nancy Pelosi, a
member of the House Intelligence Committee, has similarly warned that “China is engaged in a
full-court press to obtain American high technology to modernize its military……Yet, says Pelosi,
Washington has “turned a blind eye to this practice.”

In addition to serious economic consequences, including long run damage to the
competitiveness of U.S. companies, dangerous security implications derive from China’s
acquisition of sensitive technologies whose transfer the Clinton administration has encouraged
notwithstanding their high military and proliferation potential, e.g. advanced computers, cruise
missile engines and satellites. According to Time magazine, U.S. intelligence officials reportedly
warned the administration about one such transfer in April 1994, involving the sale of rocket
engines, that “China will gain high-quality military technology, which could be used for a new
generation of cruise missiles… which would put most of the rest of Asia within range of Chinese
nuclear attack. ”

Secretary of Defense Perry has continued to place great confidence in the reliability of General
Ding, COSTIND and China’s “conversion,” and has sought substantial U.S. taxpayers funds to
support the COSTIND effort even though this project and its participants are highly suspect.
U.S. defense intelligence analysts have identified COSTIND as an espionage organization
“attempting to steal foreign technology with military applications, primarily from the United
States.” General Ding is described in his own official biography as having “organized and
coordinated research and production of strategic missiles and the launching of satellites.”

China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, has officially defined China’s “defense conversion”
programs as follows: “Combine military and civilian, combine war and peace, give first priority to
military products and make civilian products finance the military.” The Director of the U.S.
Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. General James Clapper, has testified to the Congress, the
China’s the People’s Liberation Army plays a role in all Chinese industrial and business
organizations, especially those involving joint ventures with foreigners. Through the People’s
Liberation Army ventures and the participation of the Chinese intelligence services in the PLA
work, U.S. technology is thus immediately vulnerable to being skimmed off for the purpose of
accelerating China’s ambitious military modernization programs, programs which may threaten
U.S. allies and U.S. forces in the future.

It should be noted that while China enthusiastically uses its military and business relationships
as well as its overseas students and business contacts for technological espionage, it severely
restricts the flow of even appropriate legitimate information to western businesses. New
restrictions announced in February 1996 led Clinton administration Trade Representative Mickey
Kantor to note plaintively that: “This is, of course, an issue of free speech and censorship, but it is
also at the heart of our trade relationship …. clearly it is a step in the wrong direction, to state the
obvious.” Indeed.

8. Chinese Colonialism

In its regional imperial drive, China has used military force not only against Taiwan, but also in
pressing its extensive territorial claims in territories of the South China Sea, including the oil-rich
Spratley and Pescadores islands, in gun boat battles with Philippine and Vietnamese ships. China
is also building bases in Burma and in the Indian Ocean.

In support of its extensive sovereignty claims beyond the mainland, China has engaged in gun
boat diplomacy, has sought aerial refueling capabilities, has bought advanced strike aircraft such
as SU-27s, and is seeking an aircraft carrier and other force projection capabilities while also
building up mobile rapid-reaction forces around China’s periphery.

Fighting what senior Communist leaders consider the virus of democracy and self-rule
wherever it arises — whether in Tiannanmen, in Tibet, in Taiwan or in Hong Kong — China rejects
international human rights standards in Beijing, Tibet, or anywhere else in China’s orbit and has
made clear that when it takes over Hong Kong in July 1997 and Macao in 1998 it will remove
existing democratic laws, officials and institutions.

China appears to view the 21 million people of Taiwan much like Saddam Hussein viewed the
people of Kuwait, which he called fraq’s 19th province and then proceeded to invade. Mainland
China has not controlled Taiwan for over a hundred years, since 1895, and has maintained a
Communist Party dictatorship while Taiwan has made great strides toward democracy. Taiwan
surely has no desire or capability to attack the mainland and represents no conceivable military
threat whatsoever, yet Chinese acts of war launched missiles at Taiwan and the international
waters around it.

Isn’t it time that the people of Taiwan should feel secure in their democracy and their
self-determination without fear of attack from China and that the United States fully supports
them in this process, as required by morality and by U.S. law. If China can accept “two systems
one country,” why not “two systems two countries?” As The New York Times editorialized in
February 1996, “There increasingly is a case to be made for Taiwanese independence. Taiwan has
not been ruled by China for most of the last century. It has a different political and economic
system and its people enjoy a freedom and affluence many rightly fear could not survive under
Communist rule.”

9. A Range of Potential Threats to America’s Security

U.S. intelligence and defense department officials have recently noted that China’s military
build-up, both strategic and conventional, has increasingly serious implications for United States
security.

In May 1994, the head of the Pentagon’s Ballistic Missile Defense Office, LA. General
Malcolm O’Neill, ‘ told the Congress that U.S. intelligence analysts expected growing numbers of
Chinese missiles to be aimed at the United States and its interests. While China signed a
nontargeting agreement with Russia it turned down Clinton administration requests for such a
symbolic arrangement (unverifiable though it would have been) and some analysts report that
China’s nuclear doctrine calls for use of nuclear weapons not simply for deterrence against hard
military targets such as U.S. missile silos, but against “soft” targets, i.e. American cities. The
Clinton administration has arms control sanctions or missile defense programs which could
possibly handle such threats.

In a 1995, the Office of Net Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense concluded
that the pace of China’s military modernization program, which includes substantial conventional
force improvements, would enable China to defeat U.S. forces in a regional military conflict in
Asia by the year 2020.

During the March 1996 Chinese missile launches in and around Taiwan, a Chinese official went
so far as to threaten Los Angeles with nuclear attack if the U.S. were to defend Taiwan against
invasion from mainland China.

In recent months, Chinese criminal mafias have been caught repeatedly in
immigrants-smuggling and narcotics operations directed against the United States. A new level of
danger with potential fire- spark implications for America’s inner cities just occurred, in May
1996. Chinese agents, linked to a Chinese company directed by officials tied to China’s top
leaders, were caught in an FBI sting operation selling 2,000 AK-47 assault rifles, numerous hand
grenades, and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to Americans whom the Chinese apparently assumed
were criminals or radical militants likely to use them against American institutions.

10. In Sum: The Fatal Consequences of Clinton Administration Policy Incoherence

Senators, I have never seen anything like this administration’s high risk gambles and continuing
confusion and weakness in U.S. defense and foreign policy. Not in all the twenty five years I
served as an official in six administrations, four in the White House, and on Senate and House
staffs, from -John Kennedy to Ronald Reagan. Unless reversed, this administration’s policies will
bring America major disasters, of which a failed China policy will be just one.

At the height of the 1996 Taiwan crisis, and as China had been caught in major proliferation
schemes a Washington Post editorial captured some of the flavor of the Clinton administration’s
fatally confused China strategy as follows: “Let’s go through this carefully. American intelligence
believes China has been selling sensitive nuclear weapons related equipment…. American law and
policy prescribe a range of economic and other penalties for these dangerous contributions to
nuclear spread. Yet the Clinton administration is described as leaning toward waiving the
sanctions. The reason given is to ease tensions with Beijing and to improve the climate in which
efforts would be made to persuade China to curb those exports in the future. That’s right: the
Chinese are the accused violators, and the Americans–as the complaining and injured party–are
backing off…”

The Post editorial continued: “It is already established that the Clinton administration is putting
trade over human rights in its China policy, even though the mellowing that trade was expected to
bring about is so far not in sight. Now it is being established that the administration is putting
trade — “There are tremendous commercial opportunities there,” export chief Ron Brown said this
week — over nonproliferation as well. The administration’s China policy is on the edge of
incoherence. The Chinese could be forgiven for thinking that in any given case they can press at
the margins, play on the differences among the elements of American government and society and
have their way by standing firm.” (Emphasis added.)

In fostering extraordinarily weak norms for multilateral arms control and in all too often
appeasing Russia’s hardliners on START, national missile defenses, Chechnya (Boris Lincoln?),
economic reform, etc. t he administration set very poor precedents in undercutting reformers and
dealing with Communist nationalists, not only in Russia but also in a China unaccustomed to
keeping agreements or meeting international human rights standards.

Now, unwilling to punish China’s violations of numerous existing arms control agreements, the
administration has stepped up the flow of advanced dual purpose technology to China and pushed
for new arms control agreements which China as unlikely to heed in areas of nuclear testing,
chemical weapons, retargeting, etc.. Trade, and unfair trade at that, has been elevated far above
the efforts to improve the human rights, proliferation and military abuses that should have been at
the core of a developing U.S.-Chinese relationship.

As Deng fades from the scene, it is especially necessary for America to stop treating China’s
leaders like children and seriously to step up to China’s hardliners and to buttress the cause of the
reformers and fundamental reform. It is essential to hold China to fulfillment of its international
obligations in human rights, trade and arms control. We need a Pacific Democracy Defense
Program and more. U.S. appeasement will only increase the militancy and leverage of hardliners
in China and elsewhere around the world. Unless reversed, feckless current U.S. China policy is
sure to set back the cause of reform, responsibility and peace, and to increase potential Chinese
threats not only to key U.S. allies in Asia, but to vital U.S. interests in that region and to the
United States homeland itself.